As I’ve been 3 days working on trying to find an error on Windows (my actual project deadline is near…) and our Windows “Sysadmins” are not able to help me, I decided to go harder and read M$ documentation about how to debug their “Operating System” (they like the “metaforas” saying that this is a real OS).

At the end? I think I will add “Windows Debugging” as a new skill on my CV.
Talking with my linux workmate, We doubt many of windows sysadmins know all this tools (maybe the most famous one, systernals):

Oracle is Oracle… It has good and bad things.
The bad of course… it’s closed and you’ll be crazy before getting info about how to do things.
And the good is that everythings is inside!! just at 1 query distance ;-)

Some days ago I was trying to look for grants given to a user by another user (WITH ADMIN OPTION).
I was logged with sys and I used “my” 2 wonderful querys for obtaining that info (copy/pasted from the internet),

As you should know, there’s an important bug on TLS libs on every linux OS.
So upgrade is mandatory.
There’s also another little update in mariadb if you’re using it instead of mysql.
The problem is there, but not the indicator.

The problem in my case comes from the smtp server, I got the error:

535 5.7.8 Error: authentication failed: authentication failure

While tring to send an email (only sending, receiving works fine).
Looking in mail.log:

For all of you that are not the lucky owner of an Enterprise Manager license or you simply want to use nagios or another monitoring engine to get status and graphs of oracle, probably you’ll be using the “check_remote_oracle” plugin.

If you’re a scripter/developer maybe you’ll understand me when you open an script and see an COMPLETELY UNREADABLE code, with no functions, no indentation… etc
And then you’ll have to change anything stupid inside the script and then f**k it does not work!

This is the story of that script, I installed it, then I have to do some changes… and then I decided to rewrite it completely…
I’m not the best scripter of the world, but I know how to use functions, indentation and that useless shit :-P